LIVERPOOL – “Healthy doctors make healthy patients”, stated a GP during a workshop at the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) annual meeting. The session aimed to encourage GPs to embed lifestyle medicine into primary care through collaborative action.
Dr Callum Leesefrom Aberfeldy Medical Practice, Aberfeldy, who is also a lecturer at the University of Dundee for the Scottish Clinical Research Excellence Development Scheme (SCREDS), discussed the benefits of lifestyle medicine services in addressing lifestyle-related diseases, reducing their contribution towards the prevalence of chronic conditions, and helping prevent premature mortality.
Leese is leading a project to make Aberfeldy the healthiest town in Scotland by promoting physical activities, such as the 2 km, 5 km, and 7 km Santa Stride walking group in November, and a recent food festival to encourage healthy cooking and eating. “There’s loads of things that can be done to try and inspire change,” he said. “The research is fairly unequivocal in that healthy doctors make healthy patients,” Leese asserted. “The most important thing we can do is target our doctors and our nurses and make them advocates for what we want to see with our patients.”
Speaking to Medscape News UK, he emphasised that, “if the doctors are moving, they’re much more likely to promote it, and if they’re eating well, they’re much more likely to be able to be evangelistic.”
Physical Activity Advice Shows High Return
About one-third of the population in the UK are physically inactive, which costs the economy £7.2 billion, with £1 billion attributed directly to the NHS, he informed the workshop.
As an honorary support fellow in physical activity and lifestyle medicine at the RCGP, Leese specialises in integrating physical activity into primary care settings. “We know it’s cost effective. If we compare it to smoking cessation advice, we know that we need to give advice to one person about 50 times for one person to stop smoking in primary care. But for physical activity, you need to give advice to 12 people for one person to increase their physical activity levels to meet the guidance, he noted.
Leese stressed the importance of short but effective discussions between GPs and patients. He gave examples of online resources to recommend to patients, such as Moving Medicine, which aims to help healthcare professionals integrate physical activity into routine clinical conversations, or the RCGP toolkit (the Physical Activity Hub). “It really takes one minute of asking if the patient has ever considered being more active, and briefly explaining that being more active might have really significant outcomes for their condition,” he said.
In primary care, most patients who need to be more physically activity are directed towards 12-week exercise referral schemes, and sometimes we use social prescribing, for example, inviting patients to walk in groups, Leese explained. “However, despite the best intentions, about 78% of GPs aren’t doing it [advising on physical activity] regularly,” he noted. He cited four main challenges: lack of time, knowledge, resources, and financial support.
Geographical Variation in Social Prescribing
Social prescribing, which links patients with non-medical community support, also varies widely across the UK. “Social prescribing is a real example of that because it’s really well established in some places and not in others,” Leese remarked. He noted that inner-city and rural areas often have different needs. Contrary to some expectations, city dwellers are sometimes more active than those living in rural areas because despite having lots of green space for physical activity, “they tend to park the car outside the front door and park again right outside their place of work, whereas in London, for example, you can persuade people to get off a stop early on the Tube or a stop early in the bus.”
MAN v FAT 5-aside Football
Leese also emphasised the importance of innovation in implementing lifestyle medicine, pointing out that non-medical personnel, social prescribers, and health coaches can alleviate time pressures on GPs.
Citing an example of a physical activity-related intervention, he described a UK-wide organisation developed for men in the 40s to 50s age group, called MAN v FAT which involves a novel weight-related way of playing 5-a-side football. Players have a weigh-in before each game and teams are rewarded with points on the pitch for every pound lost as a team since their last match.
However, Leese acknowledged the need to tailor physical activity advice to different age groups. For example, “in an 80-year-old, physical activity might improve their balance and they’re less likely to fall and break something.”
Lifestyle Clinics
Leese cited the PCN Lifestyle Clinics, originating from the Leamington Primary Care Network (PCN), as an example of successful lifestyle medicine integration to help address the needs of people living with chronic conditions. “We don’t want to prescribe a model, but we can draw on a programme run by the Leamington Spa PCN, that involves four group sessions of six to 10 people focused on lifestyle,” he said.
The weekly group-based sessions are run by a GP, a health and wellbeing coach, a dietitian, and a psychiatrist. Together, they cover four aspects of lifestyle and health comprising individual challenges, how community influences behaviour and vice versa, food and nutrition, and physical activity for health and wellbeing.
“We try to debunk some of those myths around nutrition compared with diet, and physical activity compared with exercise. So, for example, the idea that exercise is usually considered to be using an elliptical cross trainer whereas physical activity, which might be just dancing in your kitchen while you’re making dinner, is something that can be done more easily,” explained Leese.
Physical activities include running and swimming in collaboration with a leisure centre. “It’s an amazing programme,” he remarked.
Outcomes from 142 patients who attended the Lifestyle Clinic at a North Leamington GP practice over 14 months showed that 53% gained confidence in making lifestyle changes, 60% noticed a positive impact on their physical health, and 77% reported positive impacts on their mental health.
GP Embraces Lifestyle Medicine
Rachel Burnett, a GP from Park Medical Practice in Derby, a delegate who attended the session, commented on the central idea of incorporating lifestyle medicine into primary care practice. She told Medscape News UK that, “I think it could prevent a lot of ill health and therefore a lot of health inequalities just by embedding lifestyle medicine into our work. To hear about the Leamington Spa project and how it’s been a success was really inspiring.”
Referring to her own practice, Burnett said: “My patients are familiar with the way I go on and on about lifestyle measures, but I believe the way forward is with group sessions because we need to give the same advice to a large number of patients, for example, with pre-diabetes. This could save time and resource, and I think patients who are more likely to make the changes will actually attend the sessions so we’re not wasting our breath.”
Contributors to this article declared no conflicts of interest.
